Changing Your NIS Passwords

You should also test to make sure your users can change their NIS passwords from the NIS clients with the yppasswd command. The process is different whether there is only a single NIS master or a master-slave server relationship.

When there is only a single NIS server, password changes can be made only on the NIS server using the yppasswd command.

Users Changing Their Own Passwords

Users can change their passwords by logging into the NIS server and issuing the yppasswd command.

[nisuser@master nisuser]$ yppasswd
Changing NIS account information for nisuser on master.my-site.com.
Please enter old password:
Changing NIS password for nisuser on master.my-site.com.
Please enter new password:
Please retype new password:
 
The NIS password has been changed on master.my-site.com.
 
[nisuser@master nisuser]$

User "Root" Changing Passwords

The root user can change other users' passwords issuing the yppasswd command with the -p switch that specifies the username that needs the change.

# yppasswd -p nisuser
Changing NIS account information for nisuser on master.my-site.com.
Please enter root password:
Changing NIS password for nisuser on master.my-site.com.
Please enter new password:
Please retype new password:
 
The NIS password has been changed on master.my-site.com.

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Running the yppasswd command on the wrong client or server depending on your NIS master and slave configuration can cause segmentation fault errors. (Make sure you follow the chapter's guidelines for password changes!) Here are some sample password change failures on an NIS client with only one NIS master server.

[nisuser@node01 nisuser]$ yppasswd
Segmentation fault
[nisuser@node01 nisuser]$
 
[root@node01 root]# yppasswd -p nisuser
Segmentation fault
[root@node01 root]#